My girlfriend had a fridge that wasn't cooling, but had power and the fans were running. So I hit the internet and found that all signs pointed to the start capacitor / relay / overload assembly on this particular model.

And, what do you know, the capacitor is bad. I didn't even have to break out my multimeter to figure it out. The capacitor has blown up... as shown here:

So, my question is this... what could cause this? I don't want to just replace the thing for it to happen again, and actually start a fire this time.

The circuit is pretty simple, so all I can imagine is that the capacitor was crap to begin with, or the compressor failed so beautifuly that it killed the cap.

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